Odessa

On my way home from Thanksgiving in Dolinka (see previous post), I spent the balance of the temperate Sunday afternoon walking around the famous city of Odessa. I was lucky to finally indulge in my first falafel since leaving Holland in July!

Other travelers I have run into continuously raved about this Black Sea port, and I couldn’t wait to feast my eyes on it.

Odessa has a severely Victorian character about it; the lampposts, sidewalks and infrastructure are something out of 1812 Hyde Park. The train station and opera house are Crimean War-era. The parks are green and manicured. This place is fancy, European, cosmopolitan and cultivated. Fantastic restaurants abound. Foreigners abound, and yet the locals do not stop to gawk at their odd tongue. Still, Odessa does have much more than a hint of Slavic culture, as the suburbs are populated with colorful Cossack cottages, the outskirts are disjointed and unplanned, and the outer skyline is guarded by wall-like concrete Soviet block apartments.

Odessa is a romantic city. Women in expensive fur coats were accompanied by well-dressed men out for a formal walk in a place that oozes a need to see and be seen. Signs advertising “marriage “agencies” promised to match attractive young women with wealthy foreigners. Fashionable young couples embrace on the waterfront. They saunter across an unassuming pedestrian overpass festooned with thousands of padlocks professing love, past, present and future.


Although some might call it an industrial eyesore, I found the port area to be a vibrantly colorful picture screen displaying Ukraine’s relationship with the rest of the world; a maritime commercial traffic jam seemed to crowd the waters immediate the port, probably from Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Crimea. Cargo was hurriedly off- and on-loaded from far flung places all over the world via the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.

Many Americans are familiar with the word Odessa (although probably can’t tell you where it is), because of New York’s Brighton Beach’s Little Odessa, a district of New York founded by Ukrainian and Russian expats. In fact, America and Odessa have a lot in common. In both lands settlement was founded by a wide diversity of gigantic refugee populations.

Odessa’s early 19th century hay day was exactly that; it was founded as a free trade settlement bolstered by grain exports from the Russian Empire. German, Greek, Moldavian, Jewish, Swiss, Polish mingled comfortably with the Ukrainian and Russian peasants, and the Nogay Tatars from the steppes. It was a city founded and managed by foreigners, existing with some autonomy in the Russian Empire. There seemed to be a very real sense of freedom here at that time.

The forefathers of the United States would have much in common with Odessa’s founder, a Frenchman by the name of Lycee Richelieu. After establishing the city and being credited with its economic success, Richelieu was appointed France’s first Prime Minister after the fall of Napoleon.

Like the Independence Hall crew, Richelieu was a man of the Enlightenment. I rather like the way Neal Ascherson, (author of the Black Sea where much of the historical info for this post comes from), put Richelieu’s character: “…energetic, austere, universal, lonely.”

The city evidently found much in common with her founder.

In my long afternoon stroll in this especially quixotic place, I felt like I did as well.

Next destination: India.

Thanks for the village life

I’ve found that when one is away, spending Thanksgiving with good friends is almost as good as spending it with good family. Six years ago, on a lonely summer November night in Sydney while picking at some wretchedly greasy fish and chips dinner (Australia = culinary desert!), I pondered the worth of the holiday season when spent with people you love. Even if you’re lounging on the beach in the tropics, even if you’re on the trip of your life, Turkey day is categorically worthless without those to share it with.

Last year this November holiday season was spent with Matt and Miriam in Budapest. This year I found myself on a train bound northwest, then west, then southwest from Simferopol in Crimea around the bending coast to the city of Odessa. My final destination for this trip was Dolinka, a tiny village on the Ukrainian panhandle. I and about eight other Peace Corps volunteers were arriving in this bustling metropolis of less than 2,000 people to assist in a social project regarding dissemination of this American holiday. Then we aimed to example this.

But first we had to get there. I always thought that getting to my site in Sevastopol was a pain the rear-end. After all, who could argue that a 17 hour train trip from the nearest airported hub didn’t make your body hurt just thinking about it? (You could always take the weekly 36 hour boat ride from Istanbul) But Eileen’s trip, though perhaps a tad shorter, was more intense even still. I met Greg and Jonothan as their Kharkiv-based train arrived minutes after mine and we met up with more still for the 2 hour bus ride across the River Dniester into Ukraine to the town of Strata. From there we just barely caught the only daily bus service to Eileen’s village.

Before now, I had only briefly spent time in a Ukrainian village. Last month I was up at Patrick’s village near the Romanian border and that constituted the bulk of my rural experience in-country. Dolinka is a Kansas-flat shire, with only one small street with a tidy row of houses down either side. There are plenty of inhabitants, if you don’t count the people. Turkeys, geese, chickens, dogs, cats, cows and mice all cruise the hood with impunity. The idea of “traffic” is in fact achieved in a Ukrainian village, however traffic consists not of honking cabs, coughing combustion engines and cell-phoned-donned pedestrians, but instead honking waterfowl, cackling roosters, caroling horse-drawn carts (am I back in south central Pennsylvania?) and clocking, sleep-walking cattle.



I love the vivid color of cottages in this country. It’s hard to do the Ukrainian blue justice by digital photo. Like the billion different shades of Irish green or the electric oranges of temples and monks of the Far East, I doubt the very viability of Ukraine’s blue anywhere else in the world. These residences are also adorned simply, yet in a highly tasteful manner not unlike some Welsh commune. I’ve never been to a Welsh commune, but let me tell you, I have a very accurate imagination.

The cats here relax in such a way that made me conclude that their American cousins are way too much in a hurry to be considered truly “lounging.” Dogs, the females anyway, appear to be much busier than their American counterparts, as the mother dogs all run around the town like they have a billion errands to do with infinite energy. But the male dogs all just lie around like there’s nothing to do on their one long, lazy vacation.




Eileen’s residence can only be described as a hobbit compound. Well, my 5’3” brother has always called me “freakishly tall” so I guess house size is a matter of personal altitude. But I have to say Eileen lives in a way that I wish I could, if even just for a few weeks. Cutting one’s own firewood for heating and cooking makes one feel like a mountain man, if one can indeed chop wood well. If one can’t, one feels like a city boy trying too hard not to chop a limb off.



Here is the kitchen. Yes, that is a bathtub. No, that does not mean there is indoor plumbing.

Griesha and Luda are Eileen’s landlords, and they are absolutely wonderful people. It is hilarious that her landlord’s name is Griesha Solivanski and my friend Greg’s last name is Sullivan (Gregory is Griesha in Russian). Both Greishas are friendly, talkative, gregarious people. They both like good food and good people. But perhaps the similarities end there.









The Solivanskis invited us over to pluck the freshly killed turkey for a Friday night dinner. Plucking a turkey was rather easier than I thought it would be. The feathers came right off after it had been soaking in hot water for a little bit. After the guest of honor was stripped naked, scorched and chopped, we delved into cabbage salad, fresh brinza (goat cheese), and some awesome potatoes while drinking homemade wine and country moonshine.



Moonshine makes people crazy and hungry. And the Butterball from Giant never arrived, so this here fellow, he rather lost his head.

The next day we celebrated Thanksgiving Day. Like I usually do on this holiday, I spent the afternoon expressing my inability to watch or play American football. (All the same, I was cheering for Alabama so that my Dad and brother would be in good spirits for the holidays – good job Crimson Tide in creaming the Eagle!) Instead, I sat and stoked the kitchen fire and watched the ladies cook dinner.

We played the greatest game of charades ever endeavored by mankind, although my nuclear allergies forced me out of the living room for the final session (is this really so much unlike a winter’s night in the states?)

I got home by way of the amazing seaside city of Odessa. In addition to the fellow who lost his head, there is so much to be thankful for for this great holiday. What a trip.